This invention relates generally to information technology and in particular to modeling information from a complex problem domain to a data representation and using the data representation to obtain knowledge about the problem domain.
One of the fundamental problems with the current state of the art in information technology is the requirement that complex knowledge be shoehorned into simplistic data structures, such as tables, lists, graphs, or trees. But the inherent complexity of a problem does not go away when the problem is forced into a simple data representations; it simply spills over into the algorithms that are used to manipulate the data representation. For example, storing data from a complex domain into a relational table structure often requires multiple tables, duplicate entries in the tables, and a large body of rules that maintain the consistency, integrity and relationships of the data. Accordingly, reducing the complexity of a data representation itself merely results in an increased complexity in the algorithms used to manage that the data representation. Because there is no systematic relationship between the identities in a relational model in existing data structures, so there has to be a very complex set of rules for referential integrity as well as complex rules for queries, joins, and other operations on the data structure.
To simplify the algorithms used to process data structures, what is needed is a way to capture fully the complexity of a real problem domain in a data representation. In this way, the algorithms used to process the data can be simplified, making the stored information more usable to solve complex problems in a particular domain.